Advances in microprocessor and video related technologies have led to wide spread deployment and adoption of numerous types of audio, video and imaging devices. Examples of such devices include but are not limited to digital cameras, camcorders, MP3 players, digital versatile disk (DVD) players, video enabled laptop and desktop computing devices as well as servers, and so forth.
Advances in networking, telecommunication, satellite and other related technologies have also led to increase in on demand and/or real time online delivery of audio and video information, including delivery over public networks, such as the Internet.
Whether videos are delivered “offline” (e.g. from a directly coupled DVD player) or online (e.g. from a video server over a networking connection), high quality audio or video inherently requires a high volume of data. Thus, audio and video delivery and rendering often involve encoding and decoding to reduce the amount of data to be stored, retrieved and/or transmitted.